Linux

Filter emails using procmail. See tutorial.
Also see Quick Start Guide

The official Red Hat CD-ROM (disk 1) can serve as a bootable emergency disk for most modern PCs with BIOS that can boot from CD-ROMs. It includes file system tools for emergency system administration. Using this disc you can attempt to recover from file system-related crashes.

When your system crashes due to a power failure or any other dire reasons, you may find your file system to be corrupt, and Red Hat Linux might refuse to boot as normal. In such a case do the following:

Insert the official Red Hat CD-ROM (disc 1) in your CD-ROM and boot your computer.

After the system starts booting from the CD-ROM you will see a screen that displays a boot prompt. Enter "linux rescue" at the boot prompt to boot the system in rescue mode.

iBackup - iBackup simplifies the task of backing up the system configuration files (those under /etc) for Solaris, *BSD, and Linux systems. You can run it from any directory and it will, by default, save the (maybe compressed) tarball to /root. It is possible to encrypt the tarball, to upload the tarball to another host, and to run the backup automated in a cron job. You can also create a nice HTML summary of a system using the included sysconf.

ApacheTop - A curses-based top-like display for Apache information, including requests per second, bytes per second, most popular URLs, etc.

User-mode Linux Kernel - User-Mode Linux is a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup.

Booting Linux Faster - This article shows you how to improve the boot speed of your Linux system without compromising usability. Essentially, the technique involves understanding system services and their dependencies, and having them start up in parallel, rather than sequentially, when possible.

Emacs Beginner's HOWTO - A part of the Linux Documentation Project by Jeremy D. Zawodny. This document introduces Linux users to the Emacs editor. It assumes minimal familiarity with vi or a similar editor...

There are other very intersting readings/posts and projects!

VOCP - Much more than an answering machine, VOCP transforms your computer into a full-featured call answering and voice messaging system. With the VOCP System, you can create an unlimited number of voicemail, pager and command shell boxes which callers will navigate using their touch tone telephone. You can send and receive faxes, listen to your email using text-to-speech, filter and redirect calls based on caller ID information, run programs through the telephone and more.

I must have started using Linux only a year back but never looked back after that. The reason to switching to Linux was the very fragile Win98 which seemed to crash ever so often, loosing a lot of time and work. Anyway, here's how a Microsoft Certified guy tackles Linux...

rsnapshot - rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility based on rsync and makes it easy to make periodic snapshots of local machines, and remote machines over ssh. rsnapshot uses hard links whenever possible, to greatly reduce the disk space required.